November and December 1641 marked a critical juncture in the royalist struggle to save the Church of England. A backlash against Puritan reforms introduced earlier in the year was gathering momentum. The Commons’ order of 8 September which sanctioned the pulling down of altar rails and the destruction of images was particularly inflammatory, since it appeared to offer licence to sectaries to dismantle divine service and smash up church interiors. The king was quick to take advantage of the situation, and during October began the process of building a royalist party which could challenge the political dominance of the Puritan Junto. In the House of Lords and the House of Commons, and then out in the country, he began rallying loyalists to his cause with the defence of the Church as the main plank of his political platform. In October he moved to fill five vacant bishoprics with candidates of unimpeachably Calvinist credentials. This was a calculated challenge to the case for ‘Root and Branch’ reform of episcopacy and a signal that the Church was safe in his hands. Then, in December, he responded to the Grand Remonstrance by promising that if parliament advised him to call a ‘national synod’ to undertake further reform of ‘unnecessary ceremonies’ he would give it serious consideration. Finally, on 10 December, he issued a proclamation ‘for obedience to the laws ordained for establishing of the true religion in this kingdom of England’.Footnote ¹ Picking up on the theme of an order made by the House of Lords in January 1641, and reiterated in September, it announced his resolve:

This was couched in the language of unity and moderation; but the earl of Essex, one of the Junto leaders, recognised that it was profoundly partisan and, reportedly, warned the king ‘that it would set all the kingdom by the ears’.Footnote ³ Law and order and the Church in danger: these were the rallying cries around which the king was building a royalist party.

The initiatives at the centre met with a ready response in the localities and there was a whole spate of petitions from the counties at this time, in defence of episcopacy or the prayer book or both.Footnote ⁴ Judith Maltby and other historians regard these as expressions of a coherent ‘prayer book Protestantism’ finding its voice after the downfall of Laudianism. Their assumption is that signatories were endorsing the traditional, established, ‘Anglican’ Church of England built on the Elizabethan settlement's rejection of the extremes of Puritanism and ‘high church’ Laudianism.Footnote ⁵ However, this has been challenged in the work of Peter Lake and John Walter who have analysed, respectively, the genesis of the petitions for Cheshire and Essex. What they demonstrate is that these petitions were the product of a very particular moment in which there was widespread alarm amongst local gentry and the property-owning classes at the extent of iconoclasm and the disruption of church services. In Cheshire, moderate Puritan supporters of reform amongst the gentry were prepared to join forces with the royalist courtier Sir Thomas Aston, whose earlier attempts to organise a county-wide petition in support of episcopacy in February 1641 they had disowned. In a petition to defend the prayer book which attracted over 8,000 signatures, godly ministers and gentry rallied around an ecclesiastical middle ground alongside conformists and loyalists. This was possible because the Cheshire petition, like most others produced at this time – whether in defence of bishops, the prayer book, or both -–was open ended and comprehensive. It sought to appeal to the broadest possible constituency by leaving open the way to future reform of the Church, emphasising the shared heritage of Protestant belief and doctrine, and focusing, above all, on the threat to order presented by the sectarian challenge.Footnote ⁶

Amongst the petitions drawn up at this time, however, one stands out as providing a full-blown and uncompromising statement of the Laudian case for episcopacy: the petition from Rutland. As Judith Maltby has observed, there is some irony in the fact that ‘the smallest county produced the largest petition’.Footnote ⁷ But even more striking is the content. Whereas other counties sidestepped the vexed issue of the origins of episcopacy – in some cases openly stating that ‘we will not presume to dispute the right of episcopacy whether it be divine or not’Footnote ⁸  – the Rutland petition confronted it head on and set out a powerful case for its iure divino origins. Similarly, whereas most groups of petitioners admitted that under the Laudian regime things had gone wrong in the Church and that parliament needed to punish offenders and initiate reform, those from Rutland were entirely unapologetic.Footnote ⁹ So what was going on in Rutland in late 1641? A significant part of the answer is Jeremy Taylor.

The Rutland petition was drawn up on 18 November 1641 and subscribed to by various county gentry meeting at Brooke, the home of the loyalist peer Viscount Campden. Overseeing the collection of signatures was Campden's second son, Henry Noel, a deputy lieutenant and, in February 1643, leader of the resistance to the parliamentarian forces who advanced into the shire under Lord Grey.Footnote ¹⁰ The petition was then entrusted to Henry Allen, a loyalist cleric from All Saints parish in nearby Stamford, who took it round to others who had not been at the Brooke meeting to gather their signatures. Among those whom he visited was his friend Edward Heath, Esq. of Cottesmore who subscribed to the petition on 24 November.Footnote ¹¹ What Heath signed up to, however, was just the first two paragraphs of the petition that later emerged.

These two paragraphs replicated the approach of most of the other petitions at this time and presented a generalised defence of bishops to which even those who advocated further reform of the Church would have found it hard to take exception. It opened with a statement deploring the ‘divers petitions exhibited to … [parliament] by persons dis-affected to the present government for the utter extirpation of the Apostolicall government of the church by bishops’. These anti-episcopal petitioners had proceeded ‘by sedulity and zeale’ to present themselves as the voice of the majority, when in fact it was those who had hitherto kept their silence, ‘the true sonnes of the Church of England’ and supporters of the ‘continuance’ of the government of that Church, who represented majority opinion.Footnote ¹²

The second paragraph changed tack to highlight the primitive origins of episcopacy and the support for it in law and custom. It urged parliament

It then added the reassuringly traditional gloss that bishops were

Setting aside the reference to the authorship of books of the Bible (which may suggest a clerical hand in drawing up this part of the petition), this was very similar in tone and content to other petitions in defence of bishops being drawn up at the time.Footnote ¹⁴ The same arguments were presented, albeit at greater length, in the petition from nearby Huntingdonshire which was already circulating in Rutland. Significantly the Huntingdonshire petition was presented to the House of Lords on 8 December by the earl of Manchester, the local peer, who shared the staunchly Calvinist views to which Heath subscribed.Footnote ¹⁵

Within a few days of signing the petition word reached Heath that it had been considerably expanded, with the addition of twenty-one ‘considerations subjoined which we hope you [parliament] will favourably expound to be a well-meant zeale … and charity to those our fathers [the bishops] from whom we have received, and daily hope to receive, many issues of benison’.Footnote ¹⁶ On 3 December Heath wrote to Allen asking for a copy of the new petition, together with an explanation of what had happened. When Allen eventually replied on 17 December he explained that after securing Heath's signature he had left the signed copies of the petition ‘at Uppingham with Mr Taylor’, and ‘from that day to this I have neither seen it nor Mr Taylor; neither doe I know what they have done with it’.Footnote ¹⁷

Heath was not pleased. Whilst waiting for Allen's reply he obtained his own copy of the expanded petition and went through it underlining passages of which he approved – those referring to the unrepresentative nature of anti-episcopal petitions and the legal and constitutional basis for existing church government and practice – and entering a cross in the margin against those sections which, as he put it elsewhere, advocated ‘the establishing of episcopacy as it now stands, as though it were by divine right’. He had also pieced together Taylor's role in the revisions. As it now emerged, he noted, ‘divers reasons annexed’ had been added to the ‘frame’ of the petition, ‘drawne by some of the clergy of this county charged as innovators and now under censure of the high court of parliament [as Taylor was]’. On these grounds, he explained to Allen, he withdrew his support from the petition and insisted ‘that either my name may be stricken out or the frame altered to that which shall be more sutable and convenient’.Footnote ¹⁸

Heath's reaction is understandable when we take account of what we know of his religious opinions. He was the eldest son of the former attorney general and chief justice of King's Bench, Sir Robert Heath, and, although only recently settled in the county, a prominent figure on the local bench of justices. Footnote ¹⁹ He appears to have shared his father's strongly-held beliefs in Calvinist orthodoxy and conformity to the Jacobean version of the Church of England. As attorney general, Sir Robert had urged the king to ‘discountenance newfangled opinions’ in the shape of Arminian challenges to Calvinist orthodoxy and had drafted a proclamation condemning such views in 1626. He was also involved in efforts to condemn the Arminian divine, Richard Montague, and he had attacked another Arminian, John Cosin, for denying the royal supremacy. At the same time, however, he was a staunch defender of bishops and the ecclesiastical status quo, maintaining in his prosecution of Alexander Leighton in 1630 that to reject bishops was to reject monarchy.Footnote ²⁰ Edward likewise appears to have had little enthusiasm for Arminianism and its manifestation in the Laudianism of the 1630s. Two of his closest friends locally were Sir James Harington and Lord Willoughby of Parham, both Puritans and later leaders of the parliamentarian cause in the east midlands.Footnote ²¹ A letter to him in July 1637 from another friend, his Cottesmore neighbour Arthur Parsey, vigorously denounced the ‘great alterations’ that had recently taken place in church services, with children there now being baptised with the sign of the cross and Parsey's own wife being presented for refusing to stand for the blessing. Parsey clearly expected Heath to share his dislike of these innovations.Footnote ²² On the other hand, Heath was very much a supporter of episcopacy, although, amidst the calls for reform of 1641 the version that he favoured was the ‘primitive episcopacy’ being promoted by Archbishop Ussher.

When approached to sign the Rutland petition, his first instinct was to support it enthusiastically. As he told Allen, ‘I shall again and again as occasion shall be offered bee as ready as any man whatsoever to expresse my desire to have the order of government by bishops in such sort continued in this our Church of England, as may be most sutable and agreeable to primitive times.’ By this he meant, as he explained elsewhere, that ‘we have such bps as Timothy and Titus’.Footnote ²³ Whether this amounted to him embracing the full Ussherian programme for ‘reduced episcopacie’ – based on extensive lay involvement, local suffragans and deanery and diocesan synods in which the clergy would share ecclesiastical decision-making with their bishop – is unclear. But it does appear that he shared Ussher's view that (like Timothy and Titus) bishops should devote themselves more closely to their pastoral roles, and that the difference between them and ordinary ministers was one of degree rather than separation.Footnote ²⁴ The notion that episcopacy should be restored to its ancient purity appears to have been a central tenet of Heath's view of the ecclesiastical order and it explains why, after initially signing the Rutland petition, he later withdrew his support.

But there was more at stake here than Heath owned up to in his letters to Allen, where he showed considerable restraint in arguing with a friend who was happy to go along with the tenor of the expanded petition. It was not just that he felt that he had been duped into signing up to something which misrepresented his view of episcopacy; he also felt that the whole process was in danger of being hijacked by those who entertained an entirely different vision of the Church of England from his own: those ‘charged as innovators and now under censure of the high court of parliament’.Footnote ²⁵

Jeremy Taylor very definitely belonged to the category of those of whom Heath disapproved. Since his arrival at Uppingham in 1638, he had become a highly divisive presence in the shire. Taylor was one of the rising stars of Laudianism during the late 1630s, picked out by Laud himself. He had come to the archbishop's attention after preaching at St Paul's in 1634 or 1635, and, with his backing, became a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, in 1635, a royal chaplain in 1636 and, then, in March 1638, was inducted into the living at Uppingham.Footnote ²⁶ There he succeeded another Laudian, Dr Edward Martin, who through the agency of his chaplain and curate at Uppingham, Peter Hausted, initiated a systematic programme for beautifying the church. Between 1634 and 1637 the communion table was railed in, the organ was rebuilt, the steeple mended and the bells rehung. These reforms were resisted by a powerful group of local parishioners led by a former sheriff of the county, Everard Faulkner. Some forty of them refused to contribute to paying for the reforms and fought Hausted through the ecclesiastical courts. In spite of this, Hausted stayed on as curate until 1639 and helped the new minister to continue the process of ‘beautification’.Footnote ²⁷ Under Taylor, if anything, the pressure for innovation increased. In March 1639, doubtless at his behest, the bishop of Peterborough, Dr Towers, summoned the recalcitrant parishioners to be interviewed at his episcopal residence. In May Taylor sent the surplices and church ornaments to Peterborough to be specially consecrated by the bishop. He used an altar cloth with the symbol IHS and also enforced Towers's order to replace afternoon sermons with catechising. And whilst he was doing all this he appears to have written a substantial treatise commending bowing and acts of reverence towards the altar, possibly for the benefit of his parishioners.Footnote ²⁸ Taylor's efforts divided the parish and in December 1640 an unnamed group of parishioners – but probably comprising those who had been fighting Hausted earlier – petitioned against him to the House of Commons. In addition to the offences mentioned above, he was accused of denying the doctrine of predestination and asserting the efficacy of free will, insisting that ‘a man cannot be saved without confession to a priest’, opposing the singing of psalms and consorting with papists. Taylor was a controversial and unrepentantly Laudian presence in Rutland. But, in spite of further investigation by the Commons’ committee for scandalous minsters hanging over him, he appears to have continued his ministry at Uppingham until well into 1642.Footnote ²⁹

Taylor’s input into the Rutland petition was an extension of his efforts at a parish level. His fingerprints are all over it. In several respects it replicated the arguments put forward in his Of the sacred order and offices of episcopacy by divine institution which was published in Oxford in August 1642. This work has been described by Anthony Milton – in the best account we have of iure divino episcopacy – as bringing together, and applying systematically, ‘the new trends of Episcopal thought’ associated with avant-garde conformists and Laudians during the 1630s.Footnote ³⁰ Given the scale of Taylor's work (which runs to nearly four hundred pages) it is very likely that he was already working on it when he added the ‘considerations’ to the Rutland petition.Footnote ³¹ His intervention over the petition appears to have been prompted by the same concerns that emerge throughout his book: to combat the pernicious influence of presbyterianism and affirm the essential role of bishops for the identity of the English Church.

Under the first of the ‘considerations’, the petition sets out a case for the dominical institution of episcopacy. Arguing from a negative – as Taylor does in his Sacred order and offices – it set forward the premise that ‘either [Christ] left his church without a lasting government or else bishops, and presbyters under them, are that government’; and, on this basis, then proceeded to argue that, since to assert the former would ‘seeme to accuse the wisdome of the father of improvidence, in the not providing for his family’, there could be little doubt that Christ had, indeed, made this provision.Footnote ³² It then advanced more positive arguments for divine institution:

The case for iure divino episcopacy, as Heath had recognised, was as clearly stated here as in Taylor's Sacred order and offices, albeit without the level of supporting evidence that he marshalled in his book.

The petition then went on to address two of the more controversial aspects of episcopal authority, much debated between Calvinist conformists who sought to keep open a space for the role of ordinary ministers, or ‘presbyters’, and the avant-garde conformists and Laudians who, like Taylor, insisted on the most absolute versions of iure divino episcopacy: these were the exclusive power of bishops to ordain and confirm. The bishops’ sole power to ordain was picked up in ‘considerations’ no. 3:

The implication of this went well beyond a simple assertion of the bishops’ power to ordain to a claim that bishops alone had the power to confer the indelible grace required to minster the sacraments.Footnote ³⁵ This was elaborated on in no. 4 which underpinned the Laudian insistence that bishops were an order apart from presbyters: ‘No presbyter did ever impose hands on a bishop which shewes … their disparity, and that a bishop hath a character which cannot be imprinted without at least an equall hand.’Footnote ³⁶

A similar insistence on the special grace transmitted by bishops emerged in ‘considerations’ no. 5 which argued that confirmation could only be performed by a bishop: ‘Without bishops no confirmation of children and yet confirmation … St Paul in his famous catechisme accounts a fundamentall point, and the church hath alwaies used it.’Footnote ³⁷ It was also alluded to in no.13 which argued that:

This was full-on Laudian sacramentalism, quite unlike anything found elsewhere in the petitions of 1641–2. Other petitions generally adopted an apologetic tone when referring to Laudian practices and commended parliament's efforts to reform these and punish offenders.Footnote ³⁸ The Rutland petition, in the spirit of Taylor's Sacred order and offices, went to the other extreme and emphatically endorsed the Laudian vision of the Church of England.

It even ventured onto the vexed issue of whether a Church without bishops could constitute a true Church. As Milton has pointed out, this was one of the most critical elements in the debate about episcopacy because the implication drawn by the more extreme Laudians and avant-garde conformists from regarding the bishops as a separate order was that Protestant Churches without bishops were not part of the true Church.Footnote ³⁹ On this issue the petition roundly declared, as ‘considerations’ no. 2, that

‘Considerations’ no. 14 added the more accommodating point of view that ‘Two parts of the Reformed Churches are governed by bishops … and the other part that wants them, have often wished them, as their own Doctors professe.’ However, those who subscribed to the petition were left to draw the obvious conclusion that ‘truth’ was difficult to sustain in the third part of the reformed church without bishops.Footnote ⁴⁰ It is hard to see how such statements had much relevance to the immediate concerns of the gentry and parishioners of Rutland; but they certainly accorded closely with the arguments advanced by Taylor in his Sacred order and offices. Footnote ⁴¹

The remaining ‘considerations’ took a more politic line, much closer to that of other petitions. They emphasised that the place of bishops in the Church was grounded in law, custom and wisdom, and that monarchy and episcopacy were interdependent.Footnote ⁴² They stressed that bishops stood ‘for the advancement of learning’ and that without them ‘wee know no reason sufficient to stifle our feares least preferment bee given to people unlearned and unfit to have the managing of soules’. And they gave full vent to the widespread fear of sectaries, ‘the multiplication of schismes’ and ‘the usurpation upon the Temporall power by Presbytery’. These were all concerns that loomed large in the county petitions, and there was little here that Heath would have found offensive.Footnote ⁴³ But the damage had been done, as far as he was concerned, by those passages relating to the iure divino claims for episcopacy. It was these that he had in mind when he told Allen that he found some of the ‘reasons’ ‘light & flashy, and some as I conceived unsound and liable to misconstruction’, ‘not precisely pertinent to the point’ and ‘unrulie and bitter against some and therefore not so convenient’.Footnote ⁴⁴

Allen was much more sympathetic to the arguments put forward in the ‘considerations’ and took Heath's request for further information as a cue for suggesting that there was, in fact, considerable common ground between his friend's viewpoint and the expanded version of the petition. He tried to suggest that in his statements of support for episcopacy Heath had, in effect, embraced the Laudian position on bishops as a separate order, whereas Allen's view was that ‘whether a bishop or a priest doe differe ordine or gradu’ was an open question. Allen also insisted that Heath's desire for ‘reforming things amiss’ was shared ‘by every good man’ and could be taken as read in the petition. What the ‘considerations’ were trying to do, Allen argued, was to anticipate and address questions raised by the petitions from other counties.Footnote ⁴⁵

The exchanges between the two friends were conducted courteously and with a relatively sophisticated understanding of the issues. But Heath was not for shifting and he concluded with a tirade against those who were taking on themselves to speak for the county in this way:

As he saw it the county had been hoodwinked. He therefore set about correcting the false impression that had been created by drafting his own petition.

This petition, which survives in several drafts in Heath's hand, was a complete turn around from the earlier petition. Firstly, it complained of

This was Heath's response to the underhand way in which ‘some few men’ had taken upon themselves to add extra ‘reasons’ not approved by the county.

In the next part he abandoned the earlier plea to parliament to preserve episcopacy in its present form and offered support for whatever new formulation the assembly came up with. Different drafts were more or less specific about the extent to which they encouraged parliament to grasp the nettle and initiate substantial reform. One version stated:

Another proposed, less contentiously, that

These different formulations suggest that Heath was groping towards a form of words which could express his conditional support for bishops and his desire for a return to a ‘primitive episcopacy’. But equally they show him wrestling with the problem of drafting a petition that would secure the county-wide support that would vindicate his stance. The different formulae pointed to the ecclesiastical middle ground that he was trying to draw together, around a rejection of both radical Puritan proposals and the quasi-Laudian counter to these. However, in spite of the care that he took over drafting, the surviving evidence suggests that he got no further than preparing the local schedules for parishioners to sign.Footnote ⁵⁰

The original petition was more successful in this respect. The extended version of the petition, which was published in May 1642, as part of Sir Thomas Aston's Collection of the petitions of divers counties, boasted the signatures of 800 gentry and freeholders and forty clergy. These numbers should, perhaps, be treated with a certain amount of scepticism, if for no other reason than that they were suspiciously rounded. None the less, it is evident from Heath and Allen's exchanges that large numbers of signatures had been collected, most of them at the initial meetings when only the first two paragraphs were shown to subscribers.Footnote ⁵¹ However, neither the Taylor nor the Heath versions of the petition were actually presented to parliament, as was the original intention.

This was hardly surprising, since there was considerable resistance in the Commons to receiving petitions in defence of episcopacy and only three of those drawn up were actually accepted by parliament.Footnote ⁵² All were presented in the House of Lords and each had a heavyweight sponsor; Manchester for the Huntingdonshire petition, the earl of Hertford for Somerset's and Lord Keeper Littleton for Cheshire's.Footnote ⁵³ In the case of Rutland the most significant gentry support appears to have come from Viscount Campden and his two sons, Baptist and Henry Noel. Baptist, the elder son, was MP for Rutland and from an early stage had identified himself with the king's cause by voting against Strafford's attainder. However, neither Baptist nor his father was in a strong enough position to push ahead with presenting the petition. By December 1641 Viscount Campden had largely absented himself from attendance in the Lords; and the only possibility of progress in the Commons might have been if both knights of the shire had been united behind the petition. But Noel's fellow MP was Sir Guy Palmes, an old ‘parliament man’ who generally sided with the opposition to the crown.Footnote ⁵⁴ However, even had Rutland had strong and united representation in parliament, it would have been difficult to go ahead with presenting it, amidst the divisions and recriminations apparent from Heath's correspondence.

As far as shaping parliamentary debate on episcopacy, the Rutland petition may have had little impact. But the processes that created it, and the controversy that it caused, do suggest broader conclusions. Through exploring the connections between a county petition to parliament, Taylor's major published tract on episcopacy and the personal exchanges between Heath and Allen as they debated the finer points of the defence of episcopacy, we can gain some important insights into the state of confessional politics in late 1641.

The first of these, perhaps unsurprisingly, is to reinforce the argument that what did more than anything to polarise political opinion in the localities in the lead up to outbreak of civil war was the fallout from petitioning campaigns. The extent of this has been emphasised by a number of historians, notably Anthony Fletcher, Peter Lake, John Morrill and Conrad Russell and it has been illustrated in detail in county studies for Cheshire, Herefordshire, Essex and elsewhere.Footnote ⁵⁵ One of the most striking instances of the way in which these petitions divided local communities was provided in All Saints parish in Stamford, Lincolnshire, just over the border from Rutland, where Heath's friend, Henry Allen, was acting as curate or parish clerk. Here the loyalist minister, Thomas Holt, pursued a highly aggressive campaign in support of episcopacy. When a presbyterian Root and Branch petition appeared in the parish early in 1641 he persuaded one of the aldermen to summon those who had subscribed to it and threaten them with punishment. Then, in the autumn, when a pro-episcopacy petition for Lincolnshire was circulating in the town, he sent Allen round to collect signatures and again reported those who did not subscribe to sympathetic aldermen, ‘to see if they could that way prevaile with them’. This episode was recalled by several deponents to the Lincolnshire Committee for Scandalous Ministers in early 1645 as a prime instance of the way in which religious and political divisions were first opened up within the town.Footnote ⁵⁶

Heath's correspondence adds to this picture. In terms of what we can discover about the events leading up to civil war, Rutland is a comparatively poorly documented shire. But such evidence as there is suggests that prior to November 1641 it was, in political terms, relatively quiescent. The elections to the Short and Long Parliaments did not generate the turmoil witnessed in the neighbouring shires of Leicestershire, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire; while the taking of the Protestation in May 1641, which led to recriminations in some shires, seems to have passed off without incident.Footnote ⁵⁷ It appears that the petition for episcopacy, and Heath's efforts to initiate a counter-petition, were the first local events to inject a divisive, ideological element into county politics. Indignation at the efforts of Taylor and his allies to hijack the ‘names of the country’ was still evident in the text of two Rutland petitions presented to the Lords and Commons on 29 March 1642 by Heath's friend Sir James Harrington, ‘accompanied by divers gentlemen of good worth’. These commended parliament for its efforts to suppress papists and the rebels in Ireland, and for putting the kingdom into a posture of defence; then harked back to the themes raised by the November petition. The upper house was congratulated for ‘passing the bill to take away the votes of prelates’ and there was a call for further action to deal with ‘the superstitious innovating ministers’, like Taylor, who were yet to be punished.Footnote ⁵⁸

The second set of conclusions is, perhaps, of greater weight. There has been a tendency in some of the recent work on these petitions – especially that of Judith Maltby – to collapse the support into a middle ground of ‘prayer book Protestantism’.Footnote ⁵⁹ As has been indicated, this is challenged in Lake's analysis of the Cheshire prayer book petition which demonstrates that the those who signed up were a loose coalition of groupings, covering a wide spectrum of religious opinions. What had brought them together was a fear of the horrors and excesses of the sectaries, and the threats that they posed to order and an established Church. John Walter and Michael Braddick have extended this critique in their work on anti-Puritan petitioning to emphasise the opportunistic and situationally-determined character of these petitions. They were not, by and large, grand statements of allegiance which could be mapped on to support for the ‘Anglican’ Church or the royalist cause, but short-term exercises in mobilising local opinion at a moment when fear of radical sectaries loomed large in the eyes of many.Footnote ⁶⁰ Several of these themes can be illustrated from the processes surrounding the Rutland petition.

One aspect that these highlight is the manipulation that could take place in gathering signatures. The tactic of presenting signatories with a relatively uncontroversial form of words and then adding to, or amending these, in the final version, was regularly complained about and it is something that Lake has also revealed in the Cheshire pro-episcopal petition of February 1641. Potential supporters were asked to sign up to a variety of different schedules, generally much briefer than the final petition, calling for action ‘for the establishment of church government according to the practise of the happy days of Queen Elizabeth’ or a similar form of words that most would have found it hard to disagree with. It was only at a later stage that the wider defence of episcopacy and the forceful condemnation of further Puritan and Presbyterian reform – to which the moderate Puritans amongst the Cheshire gentry appear to have taken such exception – was added. This enabled Aston and his allies to procure over 6,000 signatures to their petition in defence of episcopacy.Footnote ⁶¹ One can see much the same approach at work in Rutland. The priority for the original drafters was simply to get as many signatures down on paper as possible, to give the petition the appearance of a spontaneous surge of local opinion which was imperative if it was to carry political weight further along the process. This was achieved through presenting only the most anodyne sections of the petition for general scrutiny and highlighting the opportunity that it gave for the hitherto silent majority, what it referred to as ‘the true sonnes of the Church of England’, to voice their ‘just desires’. The large number of signatures that Heath and Allen alluded to (even if it fell well short of the 800 which were claimed) represented a significant expression of respectable opinion in a county as small as Rutland.

Once the signatures had been collected and the expression of local opinion successfully mobilised then it was open to the sponsors to adjust the wording and determine the context in which it was placed within the broader political arena. Again Lake's study of Cheshire petitioning offers a masterly analysis of how this could work. Aston and his leading allies in Cheshire had close connections with the royal court and in both cases the petitions were presented at moments when they could be of maximum benefit to the king's cause. The petition in defence of episcopacy was presented to the Lords on 27 February 1641, at precisely the moment when Charles's allies in the Commons were promoting episcopacy as a wedge issue, to divide the Junto Puritans and the Presbyterian Scots. The Junto peers fought long and hard against the reading of the petition, recognising its potency as a demonstration that the king had a body of public opinion behind him.Footnote ⁶² The Cheshire prayer book petition of December was first presented to Charles himself ‘and from him recommended to the house of peers by the lord keeper’. Again the timing was critical. It arrived in the upper house on 20 December, the same day as the leader of the loyalist peers, the earl of Bristol, was working to turn an anti-Catholic proposal from the Commons into an anti-Puritan measure to ban any religious opinions ‘but what is or shall be established by the laws of the kingdom’. Once more the petition offered valuable local support to the king's position.Footnote ⁶³ John Walter's study of Essex depicts a similar, albeit abortive, effort by those with connections at court to mobilise local opinion in ways which would benefit the king's efforts to build his party around an anti-Puritan platform.Footnote ⁶⁴ In the case of the Rutland petition it would appear that the ultimate aims of Taylor, and Campden and his sons, were similar: to intervene in national politics by mobilising local opinion in a way which would benefit the king's cause. However, in Taylor's case there was another agenda at work.

This focus on the processes at work in drawing up these petitions reinforces Walter and Braddick's conclusions that these petitions were often political motivated manoeuvres ‘to construct’, as much as ‘to represent’, public opinion. Their origins ‘did not lie simply in a concern to defend the rhythms of prayer book Protestantism’. Such concern was part of the equation, alongside more generalised fears of sectarian innovation. But, in the final analysis, the force and impact of these mobilisations were determined as much by the contexts in which they were presented within the arena of national politics.Footnote ⁶⁵ In the case of the Rutland petition this was relatively muted because it never actually reached parliament. But its inclusion in Aston's May 1642 collection, alongside eighteen other petitions, did ensure that it made a contribution to the second phase of royalist party building.

The Rutland petition also provides valuable evidence for the range of opinion that these petitions could encompass. As has been emphasised, they were essentially exercises in coalition-building, seeking a lowest common denominator so as to present the broadest possible front against the destruction of the established Church. In the autumn of 1641, the extent of this front was very broad indeed. At one end of the spectrum it encompassed those who in other contexts could be classified as moderate Puritans, like the Cheshire ‘middle group’ gentry, led by Sir George Booth, Sir Richard Grosvenor and Sir Richard Wilbraham who at the outbreak of civil war would either side with parliament or seek to remain out of the conflict. Their priorities would move on, and within a few months they were once again diverging very markedly from Aston and his allies as they focussed on popery as the main threat to the status quo that they wished to preserve.Footnote ⁶⁶ One of their immediate counterparts in parliament was the earl of Manchester, who promoted the Hutingdonshire petition. A staunch Calvinist, in September 1641 he had allied himself with Puritan Junto peers in resisting the decision of their fellow peers to reissue the Lords order of 16 January 1641 in protest against the Common's order of the 8 September. By December, however, he was coming to regard the efforts of the Junto and its radical Puritan allies as more of a challenge to the constitutional and religious balance that he subscribed to. In debates over control of the militia he supported loyalist efforts to retain control in the hands of the monarch; and on 8 December he sponsored the Huntingdonshire petition in the upper house. However, Manchester's loyalties remained far from fixed. By February 1642 he was back supporting the oppositionist line on the militia and bishops’ exclusion; and in May/June he continued to serve in the upper house when most loyalists had left.Footnote ⁶⁷ Heath's position was very much towards this end of the spectrum. He wanted to ensure the preservation of bishops in the Church if possible, but, as his own draft petitions indicated, he was prepared to go along with parliament-sponsored reform even if this meant looking at alternatives to episcopacy. In late 1642, however, he did side with the king.Footnote ⁶⁸

At the other end of the spectrum were the die-hard Laudians and anti-Puritans. These included clerics, like Thomas Holt, who sought to stymie Root and Branch petitions and aggressively promote the pro-episcopal alternatives;Footnote ⁶⁹ and laymen, like the avowedly anti-Puritan Yorkshire gentleman, Sir Francis Wortley. Wortley himself ventured into print in 1641 with a treatise entitled Truth asserted by the doctrine and practice of the Apostles … viz that episcopacie is iure divino, although in this he did also make the point that some recent Laudian bishops had ‘dishonoured’ the Church of England by ‘Pride, Tyranny and Covetousnesse’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Slightly closer to the centre ground, but still very much in this camp, stood Aston and his allies in Cheshire who, as Lake puts it, were ‘anxious to save as much as possible of episcopal and monarchical government from the burning car wreck of the personal rule’.Footnote ⁷¹ Taylor certainly stood at this end of the spectrum; but how far did he represent a broader strand of local opinion in Rutland?

Relatively little is known about the religious views of those who supported the expanded Rutland petition; and it may be that Taylor was a somewhat isolated figure in the local context, very much as Heath was attempting to portray him. However, this seems unlikely. It is improbable that he would undertake such an audacious move as adding the ‘considerations’ without powerful lay encouragement and some assurance of protection. This must have come, at least in part, from Viscount Campden and his two sons, who appear to have provided the initial impetus for the petition and would have played a pivotal role had it ever been presented to parliament. It is unfortunate that we know little about their religious views. However, there was also another figure in all this who, although not mentioned in the surviving documentation, may well have played an influential role: this was Sir Christopher Hatton.

Hatton was to be the dedicatee of Taylor's Sacred order and offices when it was published in the summer of 1642. He has been identified by John Fielding as the foremost lay patron of Laudian ministers in the diocese of Peterborough and, at times, an aggressive champion of Laudianism.Footnote ⁷² He lived a few miles from Uppingham at Kirby Hall, just over the county border in Northamptonshire, and he served as a JP for Rutland. Taylor had probably been introduced to him by Peter Hausted, who was one of Hatton's main clerical protégés and one can presume that he warmly welcomed the sort of changes that Hausted and Taylor were responsible for at Uppingham.Footnote ⁷³ Sir Christopher was also taking an interest in petitioning, as the survival of the Huntingdonshire petition amongst his papers indicates, and he was probably also acquainted with Sir Thomas Aston, the moving force behind important parts of the campaign in defence of bishops. Aston shared Hatton's antiquarian interests and during 1640-1 contributed the texts of two of his collection of charters to what has become known as ‘Sir Christopher Hatton's Book of Seals’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Indeed, Hatton may even have considered drawing up a pro-episcopal petition for Northamptonshire, although he would probably have been deterred by the formidable task of taking on the county's establishment of Puritan gentry and ministers. Circumstantial evidence, then, suggests that Taylor probably consulted Hatton over adding the ‘considerations’ to the Rutland petition and received his promise of support in going ahead with it. If this was the case, then Hatton, and his lay and clerical allies in Rutland and north-west Northamptonshire, can be seen as representing the sort of avant-garde conformist constituency that Taylor could talk to.

The final conclusion to be drawn from all this relates to the internal politics of the ‘Anglican’ and royalist wing of the Church. The analysis here lends support to Anthony Milton's argument that not everyone wanted to distance themselves from Laudianism in the early 1640s. There were some, particularly amongst the royalist clergy, who wished to keep open the possibility of a ‘High Church’ settlement once the dust had settled from the dismantling of the policies of the personal rule. During November and December 1641 the royalist party was advancing from strength to strength. Charles was riding the crest of an anti-Junto, anti-Puritan, wave and had astutely tacked to the middle ground with his promotion of Calvinist bishops and the December proclamation. There was a realistic prospect of a new political settlement which could restore his fortunes. Taylor, with his close contacts in what was still a Laudian-dominated Oxford University, must have been very aware that at this particular moment there was everything to play for. Avant-garde conformists had fought these battles to determine the future direction of the Church before – and had won. They could cling to the hope that, once the king was freed from his current political constraints, his High-Church and Arminian instincts would reassert themselves and they would come out on top, as they had done in the 1620s. Taylor's Sacred order and offices was surely intended as an intervention in this struggle. Milton has identified it as the most powerful and compelling statement of the avant-garde conformist case on episcopacy, a work which spelt out even more emphatically than had been done during the 1630s the implications of the Laudian position.Footnote ⁷⁵ In this context, the expanded Rutland petition can be read in much the same way. One of the striking things about it was the sophistication of the theological argument. This suggests that it was not simply directed at mobilising the local laity towards the end of royalist party-building; it was intended as a very deliberate reminder to a more clericalist audience that there was considerable breadth of support for the avant-garde conformist platform. In this respect it can be seen as a contribution to a parallel, but distinctive, struggle within the royalist cause to shape the future direction of the Church.

In the final analysis, then, the Rutland petition may not have achieved a great deal in terms of influencing the national debate or bolstering efforts to build a royalist party. But the machinations that surrounded it are still very revealing of the confessional tensions and divisions of late 1641.